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There is no law

“It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.

The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.”

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The Attorney General. There is no law in this country. There is no fucking law. I’m so sick of politics I don’t know what to do.

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3 thoughts on “There is no law”

You, I and my Con and Ad lecturer (who’s also, from what I can tell, a Guardian reader) wil no doubt have all choked on our cornflakes (or equivalent). Please bear in mind, though, that there is plenty of law in this country – see Weaselbitch’s post yesterday about the Lords upholding the right to protest and giving the police a slap for abusing their powers, for example. It just takes a hell of a long time, sometimes.

I can’t immediately think of a ‘victim’ who has locus standi (i.e who could legally take this particular case up with the courts), but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is none.

What I meant was that when the Attorney General of the United Kingdom states that it is acceptable to ignore the law if happens to be politically embarrising the very foundation of the law is weakened. What the hell kind of message does this show? That there are people who are in some circumstances literally above the law.

I think they’re actually going for a Judicial Review. As to whether that stands any chance, I’d say it depends whether the first set of judges it comes across actually remotely believe the ‘national security’ angle. The courts have some history of saying ‘No, that’s not in any way justified by national security: e.g ‘the A case’, where they ruled that you couldn’t lock up foreign nationals indefinitely without trial and a load of alleged terrorists were promptly released from Belmarsh (if only to be spied upon day and night, granted).

>What the hell kind of message does this show? That there are people who are in some circumstances literally above the law.

I quite agree. Like us, the courts take an extremely dim view of that kind of thing, which is why I don’t yet completely despair of the chances of the application of the rule of law.